The accretion of galaxies into groups and clusters

By S. McGee, M. Balogh, Richard G. Bower, A. Font, Ian G. McCarthy University of Waterloo, D. University, U. Cambridge. 2009

235 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use the galaxy stellar mass and halo merger tree information from the semi-analyticmodel galaxy catalogue of Font et al. (2008) to examine the accretion of galaxies into a large sample of groups and clusters, covering a wide range in halo mass (1012.9 to 1015.3 h−1 M⊙), and selected from each of four redshift epochs (z=0, 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5). We find that clusters at all examined redshifts have accreted a significant fraction of their final galaxy populations through galaxy groups. A 1014.5 h−1 M⊙ mass cluster at z=0 has, on average, accreted_ 40% of its galaxies (Mstellar > 109 h−1 M⊙) from halos with masses greater than 1013 h−1 M⊙. Further, the galaxies which are accreted through groups are more massive, on average, than galaxies accreted through smaller halos or from the field population. We find that at a given epoch, the fraction of galaxies accreted from isolated environments is independent of the final cluster or group mass. In contrast, we find that observing a cluster of the same halo mass at each redshift epoch implies different accretion rates of isolated galaxies, from 5-6 % per Gyr at z=0 to 15% per Gyr at z=1.5. We find that combining the existence of a Butcher Oemler effect at z=0.5 and the observations that galaxies within groups display significant environmental effects with galaxy accretion histories justifies striking conclusions. Namely, that the dominant environmental process must begin to occur in halos of 1012 – 1013 h−1 M⊙, and act over timescales of > 2 Gyrs. This argues in favor of a mechanism like “strangulation”, in which the hot halo of a galaxy is stripped upon infalling into a more massive halo . This simple model predicts that by z=1.5 galaxy groups and clusters will display little to no environmental effects. This conclusion may limit the effectiveness of red sequence cluster finding methods at high redshift.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2488039522321227bb5147ff01ce7913890d1dfe

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Citations in the corpus

The environmental history of group and cluster galaxies in a Λ cold dark matter universe (2011, methodology): “We note that McGee et al. (2009) did not distinguish between galaxies that are accreted onto the final cluster as centrals, and those that are accreted as satellites.”
Galaxy pairs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – II. The effect of environment on interactions (2010, result): “These results imply that groups arean important location for spiral mergers, in agreement with the idea of group ‘pre-processing’ (e.g. McGee et al. 2009).”
LoCuSS: THE SLOW QUENCHING OF STAR FORMATION IN CLUSTER GALAXIES AND THE NEED FOR PRE-PROCESSING (2015, background): “…mechanism by which galaxies may be transformed at large distances from the cluster center is through “pre-processing” in infalling galaxy groups (e.g., Zabludoff et al. 1996; Zabludoff & Mulchaey 1998; Kodama et al. 2001; Fujita 2004; Berrier et al. 2009; McGee et al. 2009; Dressler et al. 2013).”
Why does the environmental influence on group and cluster galaxies extend beyond the virial radius (2012, background): “One commonly identifiedindirect way in which galaxies can be environmentally affected at large distances from the centre of a galaxy cluster is through ‘pre-processing’ in infalling groups (e.g., Berrier et al. 2009; McGee et al. 2009).”
THE RISE AND FALL OF PASSIVE DISK GALAXIES: MORPHOLOGICAL EVOLUTION ALONG THE RED SEQUENCE REVEALED BY COSMOS (2009, background): “We also might expect the group abundance and typical gas density, nICM, to grow with time from z = 1.5 (e.g., McGee et al. 2009).”
Galaxy evolution in groups and clusters: satellite star formation histories and quenching time-scales in a hierarchical Universe (2012, background): “These infall fractions agree broadly with those of previous works (Berrier et al. 2009; McGee et al. 2009; De Lucia et al. 2012), though each of those works find quantitative differences arising largely from different satellite and group mass limits (see discussion in De Lucia et al. 2012).”
Galaxy evolution in groups and clusters: star formation rates, red sequence fractions and the persistent bimodality (2011, background): “…implied long time-scale for satellite quenching has led several authors to propose strangulation as the dominant mechanism (e.g. Balogh et al. 2000; McGee et al. 2009; Weinmann et al. 2010), it is unclear that a mode of strangulation in which star formation fades slowly upon infall can retain the…”
EVOLUTION OF GALAXIES AND THEIR ENVIRONMENTS AT z = 0.1–3 IN COSMOS (2013, methodology): “This strangulation process has been included in LSS evolution simulations by McGee et al. (2009) and they predict that the environmental dependence of the passive galaxies should set in at z ∼ 1.4− 1.5 (i.e ∼1 Gyr earlier than seen here).”
BUDHIES II: a phase-space view of H i gas stripping and star formation quenching in cluster galaxies (2015, background): “This idea has recently received observational (Balogh et al. 1999; Lewis et al. 2002; Verdes-Montenegro et al. 2001; Jaffé et al. 2012) and theoretical support (McGee et al. 2009; De Lucia et al. 2012).”
Dependence of galaxy quenching on halo mass and distance from its centre (2012, result): “Our result that M∗-dependent quenching dominates over Mh- and δ3-dependent quenching for centrals at z ∼ 1 is consistent with the predictions of McGee et al. (2009).”